In a wireless communication system, a radio link control (RLC) protocol may be used to convey user plane or control plane information between radio equipments, e.g., between a user equipment (UE) and radio network equipment. At the transmitting radio equipment, an RLC entity receives service data units (SDUs) from a higher layer protocol, e.g., a packet data convergence protocol (PDCP) for user plane information or a radio resource control (RRC) protocol for control plane information. The RLC entity forms RLC protocol data units (PDUs) from the SDUs. In doing so, the RLC entity may segment any given RLC SDU into multiple portions or segments such that different RLC PDUs contain different portions or segments of the same RLC SDU. The RLC entity then sends the RLC PDUs to a lower layer protocol, for transfer to a peer RLC entity at the receiving radio equipment. The peer RLC entity may re-assemble the received RLC PDUs into RLC SDUs, taking into account any segmentation performed at the transmitting end.
In some cases, such as when information transfer is performed in an acknowledged mode (AM), the RLC protocol uses re-transmissions to guarantee lossless information delivery. To accomplish this, the peer RLC entity at the receiving side must send status reports to the RLC entity at the transmitting side indicating what information was lost and needs to be re-transmitted. However, providing these status reports for the RLC protocol or other protocols may prove complicated in some contexts that threaten to increase status report size and the corresponding overhead associated with re-transmissions.